Friday, October 24, 2008

Sorry, it's been a while

Good news! I'm now a Collabora employee, hired part-time to hack on PiTiVi. We have set a deadline for this coming April to finally have a usable release. It's rather ambitious, considering how long this project has been languishing, but I think we're finally in a position to really make some progress. Now that we have basic cutting and trimming, we're moving on to the more challenging features. The following is a list of the user-visible features we want to have working by this April.

moving/trimming multiple items

support for still images (along with zooming, croping, rotating and scaling)

linking and unlinking clips

multi-layer editing...

..which goes hand-in hand with audio mixing and video compositing...

...as well as basic video effects.

undo/redo support

This is the big push, and unfortunately, it requires more back-end work. At least this time, I'll be able to help out with a good portion of it, since a few of the changes are based on my own ideas. The refactoring will enable the features listed above, as well as support some long-term goals:

Multi-track editing (i.e. multiple named output channels)

Subsequences and subcompositions

Combining media media from multiple sources into a unified objects (syncing separate audio and video, for example, or combining video from multiple cameras into a single object)

Converting between media types, like converting an audio stream to a video stream with a visualizer plugin.

Pre-rendering and caching of data.

Re-conforming a project between different resolutions, codecs, and container formats.

I have already started work on an improved UI framework, which is almost complete. When the existing interface is ported over to it, we'll be able to add new features more easily than at present.

We're also adding a new UI component: the property editor, which will allow the user to tweak per-object properties. This interface will also be extensible: modules and plugins can provide appropriate controls for a wide range of editing tasks, from chroma key to animation.